There is always a focus in this blog on digital literacy. The next two days in the Beaufort County School District we are going to explore the skill sets needed for students and teachers in the area of web literacy. We will be using the work of Alan November as a content platform and then three other interactive web sites designed for us to reflect on our own web literacy skills.
I looked for a definition of web literacy on Wikipedia and found it interesting that they do not have specific page for web literacy. They direct you to Alan November’s work and to “information literacy”. The value of wikipedia itself can stimulate a conversation about web literacy.
Explore these interactive “web literacy” sites and lets share our experiences.
Answer a quick question for us. On an average day, how many students do you work with in all of your various activities? Click here to submit that number…
At the completion of today’s session please let us know what you thought about it .Click here…
I have the wonderful opportunity this spring to be teaching an online Personel Health course for high school students in the South Carolina Virtual High School system. I have 27 diverse, active, and fun students from all over the state. Some are taking this state required Health course because they need more AP classes to apply to Ivy League schools and others are working hard to earn a diploma. We are only 2 weeks into the course and our learning community is connected, interacting and sharing ideas. As a certified Health educator I always told students that health was the most important class they take in high school because as young adults they are making lifestyle choices that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.
Now here is what I have to share today. This article below about the present state of education in this country and how online learning environments are going to grow is worth your time to read. It is brief, to the point, and cited well.
The Online Learning Imperative: A Solution to Three Looming Crises in Education Click to read it…
Today will be fun working and learning with the performing arts teachers in Beaufort County. It is always a pleasure to work with these teachers because they have the greatest opportunity of all the content areas to allow students to express themselves. We will be exploring numerous ways to provide students with tools to demonstrate their skills and talent in the performing arts.
There are so many new web based applications to support performance arts and one of my favorites is the Art Edge. We will be exploring this site and many others today.
My opening slide today has a quote from Maxine Greene in 1989: “Artist are for disclosing the extraordinary in the ordinary”
In the next 2 weeks you will receive an announcement for another Digital Literacy Conference at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina on June 11 & 12, 2010. There will be ESOL, digital literacy and curriculum mapping strands.
The Sheskey Learning team of presenters will be in Greenwood School District 50 in Greenwood, South Carolina on Friday February 19, 2010 working and learning with the teacher on their professional development day.
As always, I am sharing with you a classroom learning tool that you will find effective with students. Today’s Meet is a safe and user friendly site that provides a web based student/audience response system that can engage learners in computer lab, laptop, or Internet phone setting. There are no advertisements or learning curve with this tool, just open it, ask your questions and let responses flow. It is a wonderful for creating authentic conversations.
Enjoy, and I look forward to seeing all of you soon!
Today I have the opportunity to share Google’s Custom Search tool with media specialist and teachers in the Beaufort County Schools in South Carolina. In the search bar, type in search terms for anything related to the Haiti earthquake. Then type in any thing not related to the Haiti earthquake and see what happens. You can build your own search engines for specific research that you want students to do and reduce the risk of them getting away from the specific search task that they are assigned. See this and other powerful tools at the Google for Educators resource site
I look forward to working with the teachers in the Osage Area Consortium on Monday. It will be a great opportunity to work, learn, and make new friends…
Those of you that have participated in a workshop with me in the last 6 months have seen my demonstration of the XtraNormal web tool to create fun cartoon style videos by just writing a script. We shared it to introduce yourself, new topics or new units. XtraNormal has now released a new tool called “State”. It takes their web based video application that you can now download and create videos without being connected to the Internet. There aren’t as many free characters and avatars as before but you can do much more animation with the characters in the new application. Plus it exports the video nicely to your computer. Those of you who like XtraNormal now will love this tool. Check it out and let me know how you like it.
I arrived home from a family holiday visit and there was FedEx package on my doorstep. It contained 2 copies of the the book Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World and sure enough Chapter 12 had my name on it. I can’t wait to read the rest of the book. Dr. Jacobs and our Curriculum 21 team are building various conferencing and online resources that are centered around the book. You will be receiving more information shortly. Those of you that are ASCD members will be receiving it in the mail as your next member book. ASCD tells me that there are over 100,000 members that will receive the book. All I can says is, wow…
Be looking for an announcement this month about a June ESOL and Digital Literacy Conference somewhere in the coastal region of South Carolina. The interest following the Digital Literacy Conference in Greenville in November has been great and we will let you know about the next one…
This weeks web based learning tool comes from NASA. Science, math and social studies instructional leaders will love this archive of NASA videos, images and audio recordings. It is the best archive of our space program that I have seen to date.
One last tidbit for those of you who have SmartBoards, if you like to use the calendars that are in the gallery you may have trouble finding 2010 and beyond there. Go to the search line in the gallery and type in “calendar generator” and there is a tool that will make a calendar for any month you want in the coming years.
Can you believe that it is 2010? What are the next 5 years going to be like in the classroom?
Greetings from Bill and I hope that you have a happy and restful holiday season. In 2009 I made many new friends and established great connections with colleagues all around the country and the world. The 2009 conferences at Clemson University and Greenville were both successful and I appreciate the chance to share digital literacy strategies with teachers from all over South Carolina. The opportunity to work in both the Oconee and Beaufort County School Districts has helped me continue to grow my professional practice and I am thankful for all the friends that I’ve made in that work. I am grateful to district superintendents, Dr. Mike Lucas and Dr. Valerie Truesdale, for their support of my work. The collaborative work with Dr. Heidi Hayes Jacobs and her Curriculum Designers team has been inspiring and she motivates all of us to be leaders in education. We are living in the greatest time of change ever experienced in education and I will continue to work every day to see that our students will benefit from the positive changes occurring all around us.
The year Two-Thousand-Ten is only a few days away and I look forward to the New Year. Dr. Jacob’s Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World will be released in January and I am proud to be a contributing author (Make sure you read Chapter 12 when you get the book). You will be receiving updates about the activities and conferences built around the release of the book. We are excited that Curriculum 21 will be the first ASCD member book of 2010. Look for more news coming about our expanding opportunities to work with ESOL teachers and administrators all round the southeast. I am planning more digital literacy conferences and look forward to continued collaborations with individual school districts all around the country.
As always, I will leave you with a learning tool that can help you engage your students. Do you like the holiday photo I made for you in this post? That was made with one of my favorite Web 2.0 tools, Picnik. I have shared it everywhere I go this past year and I hope that you will have fun editing your holiday pictures. Take care, and enjoy your family time; I look forward to working and learning with you in 2010.
There is always a focus in this blog on digital literacy. The next two days in the Beaufort County School District we are going to explore the skill sets needed for students and teachers in the area of web literacy. We will be using the work of Alan November as a content platform and then three other interactive web sites designed for us to reflect on our own web literacy skills.
Welcome to the Greenwood District 50 Digital Literacy Workshop. Here are some of the web resources that we are sharing today:
I have the wonderful opportunity this spring to be teaching an online Personel Health course for high school students in the South Carolina Virtual High School system. I have 27 diverse, active, and fun students from all over the state. Some are taking this state required Health course because they need more AP classes to apply to Ivy League schools and others are working hard to earn a diploma. We are only 2 weeks into the course and our learning community is connected, interacting and sharing ideas. As a certified Health educator I always told students that health was the most important class they take in high school because as young adults they are making lifestyle choices that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.
Greetings from Bill and I hope that you have a happy and restful holiday season. In 2009 I made many new friends and established great connections with colleagues all around the country and the world. The 2009 conferences at Clemson University and Greenville were both successful and I appreciate the chance to share digital literacy strategies with teachers from all over South Carolina. The opportunity to work in both the Oconee and Beaufort County School Districts has helped me continue to grow my professional practice and I am thankful for all the friends that I’ve made in that work. I am grateful to district superintendents, Dr. Mike Lucas and Dr. Valerie Truesdale, for their support of my work. The collaborative work with Dr. Heidi Hayes Jacobs and her 
